Years ago, well, about nine years ago, a friend of mine came to visit us in Vigo. Among other things, we strolled through the old quarter, a rather run-down old quarter, in need of renovation, a prime site for gentrification if someone had the money to invest. Since then renovation work has taken place but it still has a long way to go.
However, renovation of the old quarter is not what I had in mind today. During our stroll, my friend took some appealing photos of cats sitting on the top of bits of tumbling-down buildings. Looking very cute, of course, but these were feral cats.
There were lots of them!
On another occasion, at around the same time, a Spanish friend of mine told me, with wry amusement, about the day she helped an elderly lady pull her shopping trolley up a slope on the edge of the town centre. She thought, quite understandably, the old lady was heading for home and my friend was doing her good deed for the day. Towards the top of the slope the old lady asked her to stop. They were outside a derelict site, probably another bit if the old quarter. Surely the old lady did not live there! Of course not! The old lady opened her shopping bags, took our bowls and tins of cat food and proceeded to dish it out for the stray/feral cats which came running. My friend, less than impressed, invented an excuse and left her to it.
I was reminded of this when I came across this article in today’s Observer magazine, all about a couple who run a cat sanctuary on the Greek island of Syros. They advertised on social media for someone to help run the place: housing provided, a car, a salary of £450 a month and a view of the Aegean. For that they wanted some skills: cat-whispering, feline psychology and some veterinary experience.
The name of the place says it all: “God’s Little People Cat Rescue”.
You can probably guess that I would not have applied, not in a month of Sundays, not even for a free house in Greece. 35,000 people disagree with me. The couple have had to employ assistants to go through the applications.
Now, almost everywhere I have travelled in Spain and Italy I have come across colonies of feral cats. Certainly in Spain if people have pet cats they seem to be indoor animals. None of the roaming round that British pet cats get up to and then go home for dinner. Once long ago, my Spanish niece, then about six years old, saw a cat approaching along a wall near my parent’s home in Southport. My children would have gone to stroke it. Her reaction was to back off, declaring, “Es un gato salvaje!” - “It’s a wild cat!”
But I have never come across such colonies of feral cats in the UK. Do they not exist? I have I simply not been to the parts of cities where the wild cats hang out?
So I googled it.
And I found this from 2012:
“Increasing numbers of pet owners are being forced to abandon their animals because they can no longer afford to keep them in the economic crisis.
Startling new figures show that the UK is being overrun by an unprecedented number of stray cats as owners can't afford to neuter their animals or care for their litters.
Meanwhile, many owners have become amateur breeders to supplement their income which has caused an explosion in the cat population.”
A more recent appeal asked us to “Support the rescue, rehabilitation and rehoming of cats across England and Wales by sponsoring our cat pods. Put £6.50 a month towards our work with cats and receive regular updates on how you're helping.
With the current cat overpopulation crisis facing the UK and our centres housing hundreds of cats - more than the number of dogs and rabbits combined - they need our support more than ever.”
And from this year, I think, I found this:
“Colonies of wild cats, totalling about 200 across six main sites, have been springing up around the Wycombe district since summer.
There have been as many as 30 animals in each location.
Despite a plea going nationwide after a Bucks Free Press article in August was picked up by BBC television and radio and various national newspapers South Bucks RSPCA is still in dire need of volunteers to help its operation.
Spokesman Pat Edgar said: "Despite all this fantastic publicity only around half-a-dozen local volunteers came forward and the charity is still desperately seeking more help.
"A neutering programme is currently being undertaken with the aim of controlling and reducing the feral cat population.
"Volunteers are needed to work as part of the team humanely trapping the cats, taking them to a local vet for a health check and neutering, and later returning them to the site or onward for homing on farms.
"If a kitten can be trapped and brought into the charity’s care before its six weeks old, there is a good chance of being able to socialise the animal and re-homing it into a loving household as a domestic pet.
"Left longer, it will probably remain feral for life."”
So, there it is: a feline problem of which I was blissfully unaware!
Sunday, 9 September 2018
Saturday, 8 September 2018
We are what people think we are. Sometimes anyway.
The actor Burt Reynolds has died at the age of 82, apparently working-almost to the end on a Quentin Tarantino film. In the news item informing us of this I read; “Reynolds, who famously turned down the roles of James Bond and Han Solo, never-the-less forged a film career that marked him out as a singular talent.”
How curious, I thought to myself, that success should be judged on whether or not one had played James Bond or Han Solo.
Similarly, Alec Guinness, who has played all sorts of roles, seems to be known nowadays as Obi-Wan Kenobi from the Star Wars films. And Sir Ian McKellen is forever Gandalf from Lord of the Rings. And so a whole acting career is reduced to one role! Curious indeed!
It can happen to more ordinary mortals as well. At one point in my teaching career I did the training and got the certificate to teach GNVQ, vocational courses. I did this with the idea that the GNVQ coordinator in my college would introduce Language Units to the advanced level courses in Business and Travel and Tourism. However, when the courses got going, the Language Units were put on hold and I found myself shanghaied into teaching, or “delivering” as the jargon had it, foundation level units in Travel and Tourism. As if I knew anything about customer service and marketing and such like! I suppose I knew more than the foundation level students!
When a new member of staff joined the team it must have taken almost a year for her to realise that I was not a Travel and Tourism teacher who also taught A-Level Spanish on the side, but a Spanish teacher who, always rather grudgingly, taught Travel and Tourism on the side.
So it goes!
By the way, here is a link to what the estimable Hadley Freeman has to say about Burt Reynolds.
In the ongoing debate about mobile phones and mass media, President Macron has introduced measures to prevent French schoolchildren from using their phones during the school day. I wonder why it took him so long. It seems to me perfectly obvious that they should switch their phones off in school. Some of the youngsters found it rather refreshing to actually TALK to their friends instead of constantly texting them. Others felt that they had been deprived of a topic of conversation as they spend a lot of time comparing snapchat and instagram photos and felt that they should be allowed to do this during breaks at school. Isn’t it rather sad that some of them regard that as the mainstay of their conversation? Not even what-I-saw-on-tv or the latest films and music. I am discounting totally topics like books and current affairs. Anyway, here is a link to an article about it.
And finally, here is a link to an article about yet another really bad restoration job on religious artwork in Spain. That makes three! My mother always told me that things went in threes: accidents, broken glasses, buses coming along when you have been waiting for ages. And now, making a mess of ancient religious artefacts.
One thing in favour of the bad restorers: at least they care enough about the works to want to try to improve them.
How curious, I thought to myself, that success should be judged on whether or not one had played James Bond or Han Solo.
Similarly, Alec Guinness, who has played all sorts of roles, seems to be known nowadays as Obi-Wan Kenobi from the Star Wars films. And Sir Ian McKellen is forever Gandalf from Lord of the Rings. And so a whole acting career is reduced to one role! Curious indeed!
It can happen to more ordinary mortals as well. At one point in my teaching career I did the training and got the certificate to teach GNVQ, vocational courses. I did this with the idea that the GNVQ coordinator in my college would introduce Language Units to the advanced level courses in Business and Travel and Tourism. However, when the courses got going, the Language Units were put on hold and I found myself shanghaied into teaching, or “delivering” as the jargon had it, foundation level units in Travel and Tourism. As if I knew anything about customer service and marketing and such like! I suppose I knew more than the foundation level students!
When a new member of staff joined the team it must have taken almost a year for her to realise that I was not a Travel and Tourism teacher who also taught A-Level Spanish on the side, but a Spanish teacher who, always rather grudgingly, taught Travel and Tourism on the side.
So it goes!
By the way, here is a link to what the estimable Hadley Freeman has to say about Burt Reynolds.
In the ongoing debate about mobile phones and mass media, President Macron has introduced measures to prevent French schoolchildren from using their phones during the school day. I wonder why it took him so long. It seems to me perfectly obvious that they should switch their phones off in school. Some of the youngsters found it rather refreshing to actually TALK to their friends instead of constantly texting them. Others felt that they had been deprived of a topic of conversation as they spend a lot of time comparing snapchat and instagram photos and felt that they should be allowed to do this during breaks at school. Isn’t it rather sad that some of them regard that as the mainstay of their conversation? Not even what-I-saw-on-tv or the latest films and music. I am discounting totally topics like books and current affairs. Anyway, here is a link to an article about it.
And finally, here is a link to an article about yet another really bad restoration job on religious artwork in Spain. That makes three! My mother always told me that things went in threes: accidents, broken glasses, buses coming along when you have been waiting for ages. And now, making a mess of ancient religious artefacts.
One thing in favour of the bad restorers: at least they care enough about the works to want to try to improve them.
Friday, 7 September 2018
Some odd things I have come across.
A friend of mine found some statistics about parliamentary motions condemning anti-Semitism. On average a very small percentage of MPs supported them all but the man accused of anti-Semitism supported all of them. Quite a good record, you might think.
It’s a little bit of truth that some people won’t face up to.
If you say something often enough, even if it’s arrant nonsense, it becomes an accepted “truth”. We see it all the time!
(Just look at the Novichok story. It MUST be the Russians!
Here’s a post from James Melville that comments on that and the Brexit nonsense:-
“Theresa May has confirmed that thanks to the EU, Britain has obtained an European Arrest Warrant to arrest the Russian Novichok suspects. Phew, just in the nick of time. In a few months time, Britain won’t be able to do this.”
No comment on that!)
And Tony Blair has accepted the anti-Semitism story, hook, line and sinker. In an interview he “said he could not imagine the antisemitism row taking place “in the Labour party that I joined”. “I can’t imagine that we have had three to four months debating over something where we have profoundly insulted the Jewish community in our country,” Blair said.”
I am currently reading “The Untold History of the United States” by Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick. In the introduction, which talks a lot about the USA’s empire building, at one point they write about the depression at the end of the 19th century, triggered by the financial panic on Black Friday, May 5th 1893. Here’s a sample:
“The nation debated the depression’s causes and sought ways to avoid future economic collapse. Those who believed that the 1893 depression resulted from overproduction argued that the United States needed more markets abroad to absorb its growing surplus. Socialists, trade unionists and reformers, on the other hand, believed that the 1890s crisis resulted from underconsumption and proposed a different solution: redistributing wealth at home so that working people could afford to buy the products of American farms and factories.”
Amazingly, surprisingly, few capitalists endorsed that approach! They wanted to keep their wealth, even if they had more than they knew what to do with.
Over a hundred years ago and still the same problems!
It’s a little bit of truth that some people won’t face up to.
If you say something often enough, even if it’s arrant nonsense, it becomes an accepted “truth”. We see it all the time!
(Just look at the Novichok story. It MUST be the Russians!
Here’s a post from James Melville that comments on that and the Brexit nonsense:-
“Theresa May has confirmed that thanks to the EU, Britain has obtained an European Arrest Warrant to arrest the Russian Novichok suspects. Phew, just in the nick of time. In a few months time, Britain won’t be able to do this.”
No comment on that!)
And Tony Blair has accepted the anti-Semitism story, hook, line and sinker. In an interview he “said he could not imagine the antisemitism row taking place “in the Labour party that I joined”. “I can’t imagine that we have had three to four months debating over something where we have profoundly insulted the Jewish community in our country,” Blair said.”
I am currently reading “The Untold History of the United States” by Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick. In the introduction, which talks a lot about the USA’s empire building, at one point they write about the depression at the end of the 19th century, triggered by the financial panic on Black Friday, May 5th 1893. Here’s a sample:
“The nation debated the depression’s causes and sought ways to avoid future economic collapse. Those who believed that the 1893 depression resulted from overproduction argued that the United States needed more markets abroad to absorb its growing surplus. Socialists, trade unionists and reformers, on the other hand, believed that the 1890s crisis resulted from underconsumption and proposed a different solution: redistributing wealth at home so that working people could afford to buy the products of American farms and factories.”
Amazingly, surprisingly, few capitalists endorsed that approach! They wanted to keep their wealth, even if they had more than they knew what to do with.
Over a hundred years ago and still the same problems!
Thursday, 6 September 2018
On coffee and clutter.
Sitting in the Aroma Cafe at Rochdale infirmary, waiting while Phil undergoes what they assure us is a routine procedure, I buy a flat white, the nearest thing I can find to a reasonable cup of coffee. It even comes in a fairly normal sized cup. What I cannot fathom is why such drinks are always served at mouth-scalding temperature. At least in the hospital it only cost me £1.60? Much more reasonable than many coffee outlets in this country.
But this is still a far cry from the continental coffee habit of popping into a cafe, downing a quick coffee at the counter and going on your way. I don’t think that will ever come into practice here.
Funnily enough I am pretty sure there are pubs, somebody’s local, where people drop in for a quick half, drink it at the bar and go on their way.
Different countries and different habits!
The other day Phil commented, in frustration at not laying his hands quickly enough on the shirt he wanted to wear, that he has too many clothes. So yesterday I pulled ALL his clothes out of the wardrobe and made him decide what was for keeping. Failing that, I would take an executive decision and throw almost everything out. And so we ended up with a couple of bags of stuff still in good condition but which he never intends to wear, (However did it occur to me that might wear linen trousers or a linen jacket? Just not his thing at all!) which will make its way to the charity shop. And then there was a mound of stuff for simply throwing out: stuff kept out of inertia, or in case it came in useful to wear when gardening or decorating!
And suddenly all the stuff he wants to wear in accessible with ease.
It was quite cathartic! It must be time I did it again with my stuff as it must be almost a year since I went through it all.
All of us end up cluttered up with belongings.
I really should go through the kitchen cupboards and give away to a good home the various pots and dishes bought on impulse and rarely, if ever, used.
Earlier thhis year I carried out a similar procedure with collections of photos. Pictures of Christmas trees from twenty years ago serve no useful purpose, especially when they all look the same and you can’t tell one year from another. Ditto pictures of cute lambs in fields!
My phone forces me to do this from time to time as it starts to tell me that the storage is almost full. And there I was, thinking it was almost infinite! So I have deleted stacks of messages from the dentist or the hairdresser, reminding me of the time of my appointment, routine messages about where to meet people and other non-essential clutter.
Decluttering is the name of the game!
Now I need to pluck up courage and attack the VAST collection of books!
But this is still a far cry from the continental coffee habit of popping into a cafe, downing a quick coffee at the counter and going on your way. I don’t think that will ever come into practice here.
Funnily enough I am pretty sure there are pubs, somebody’s local, where people drop in for a quick half, drink it at the bar and go on their way.
Different countries and different habits!
The other day Phil commented, in frustration at not laying his hands quickly enough on the shirt he wanted to wear, that he has too many clothes. So yesterday I pulled ALL his clothes out of the wardrobe and made him decide what was for keeping. Failing that, I would take an executive decision and throw almost everything out. And so we ended up with a couple of bags of stuff still in good condition but which he never intends to wear, (However did it occur to me that might wear linen trousers or a linen jacket? Just not his thing at all!) which will make its way to the charity shop. And then there was a mound of stuff for simply throwing out: stuff kept out of inertia, or in case it came in useful to wear when gardening or decorating!
And suddenly all the stuff he wants to wear in accessible with ease.
It was quite cathartic! It must be time I did it again with my stuff as it must be almost a year since I went through it all.
All of us end up cluttered up with belongings.
I really should go through the kitchen cupboards and give away to a good home the various pots and dishes bought on impulse and rarely, if ever, used.
Earlier thhis year I carried out a similar procedure with collections of photos. Pictures of Christmas trees from twenty years ago serve no useful purpose, especially when they all look the same and you can’t tell one year from another. Ditto pictures of cute lambs in fields!
My phone forces me to do this from time to time as it starts to tell me that the storage is almost full. And there I was, thinking it was almost infinite! So I have deleted stacks of messages from the dentist or the hairdresser, reminding me of the time of my appointment, routine messages about where to meet people and other non-essential clutter.
Decluttering is the name of the game!
Now I need to pluck up courage and attack the VAST collection of books!
Wednesday, 5 September 2018
Some thoughts about food.
This morning I did my usual Wednesday run to Uppermill to buy fresh fish and some fruit and veg from the Wednesday morning market. My quest for tasty apples (I am very picky about apples) was rewarded with a hybrid apple from the fruit and veg man. He is my usual source of Coxes apples at this time of year but the apples on his stall, although they had a Coxes look about them didn’t quite convince me. So I asked and was informed that they are a Coxes cross. He wasn’t sure what they were crossed with and told me that they grower has not yet decided on a name for the resulting fruit. However, he assured me that they were tasty and so I bought a few to try. Sampled in our late breakfast, they proved to be a good buy.
Here’s something I found about sweet hummus, a concept I find rather odd:
“There is, it has to be said, something slightly unappealing about the thought of sweet hummus. Chickpeas are a natural bedfellow for tahini, garlic and cumin. But chocolate? Mixed berries? Banoffee? It would help if Harry Tyndall had a rootsy backstory with which to sell his sweet hummus – if he were reviving an ancient Levantine dessert, say, or had been handed down a family recipe through 17 generations. But no – when he first had the idea, he struggled to find others who had tried anything similar (one US company, Delighted By Hummus, served as inspiration with its chocolate, vanilla and snickerdoodle flavours). His company, Hou Loves Hou, is the first to sell sweet hummus in the UK. Could the hot fudge brownies and creme brulees of this world really be defeated by hummus?
Actually, Tyndall hopes to disrupt the spread market – compared with jams, nut butters and chocolate spreads, Hou is healthier, boasting lower sugar and saturated fat content, thanks to its virtuous chickpea base. Still, sweet hummus … would you put that in your mouth? I gamely opened the first of three nicely branded tubs (£2.99 for a 180g pot). All are smooth in texture, but the chocolate Hou is especially thick, thanks to the coconut milk included in its ingredients.”
But there it is. In the modern world there is a tendency to make everything sweeter. Our taste buds are trained from an early stage to prefer sweet over savoury.
The article continued:
“Health is Tyndall’s main concern. He had a reckless youth, microwaving whole tubs of Ben & Jerry’s and drinking them as smoothies. Now 30, he suffers from kidney stones and gout, possibly as a consequence. He had to reinvent his diet – no red meat, no red wine and definitely no ice-cream smoothies – and that is where the idea for Hou came from. He is especially excited about entering the children’s market; I can confirm that my two-year-old was particularly enthusiastic about the mixed berry flavour, shouting “more hummus” repeatedly in a way that definitely wouldn’t sound sickeningly middle-class if aired in public. Plus, the team behind Hou will be pleased to hear that, with no prior chickpea associations embedded in her head, she had no problem putting it in her mouth.”
Now, the two-year-old in our family eats with delight ordinary, plain, old-fashioned hummus without needing to have chocolate or fruit flavours added. And we don’t feel “sickeningly middle class’ about it.
Personally I have just discovered beetroot hummus, which is interesting, but I prefer the original version.
I have also recently discovered almond butter. I have never been a fan of peanut butter, even though I could eat peanuts until they come out of my ears, but almond butter, no added sugar or artificial flavourings, thank you, I find very good spread on my morning toast.
On the subject of almonds, I found this stuff about almond milk, one of the trendy substitutes for proper milk from cows:
““But what people don’t know is the environmental damage almond plantations are doing in California, and the water cost. It takes a bonkers 1,611 gallons (7,323 litres) to produce 1 litre of almond milk,” says the Sustainable Restaurant Association’s Pete Hemingway. Over 80% of the world’s almonds are grown in California, which has been in severe drought for most of this decade. Hemingway describes a situation in which farmers are ripping up relatively biodiverse citrus groves to feed rocketing demand for almonds, creating a monoculture fed by increasingly deep water wells that threaten statewide subsidence issues. That leaves rather a bad taste in the mouth.”
Here’s a link to the article that came from, an article about sustainable eating, or indeed sustainable living.
You could go crazy thinking about how to organise your life, your eating habits and all the rest. In the end, I suppose, what we need to do is eat sensibly.
Moderation in all things!
Here’s something I found about sweet hummus, a concept I find rather odd:
“There is, it has to be said, something slightly unappealing about the thought of sweet hummus. Chickpeas are a natural bedfellow for tahini, garlic and cumin. But chocolate? Mixed berries? Banoffee? It would help if Harry Tyndall had a rootsy backstory with which to sell his sweet hummus – if he were reviving an ancient Levantine dessert, say, or had been handed down a family recipe through 17 generations. But no – when he first had the idea, he struggled to find others who had tried anything similar (one US company, Delighted By Hummus, served as inspiration with its chocolate, vanilla and snickerdoodle flavours). His company, Hou Loves Hou, is the first to sell sweet hummus in the UK. Could the hot fudge brownies and creme brulees of this world really be defeated by hummus?
Actually, Tyndall hopes to disrupt the spread market – compared with jams, nut butters and chocolate spreads, Hou is healthier, boasting lower sugar and saturated fat content, thanks to its virtuous chickpea base. Still, sweet hummus … would you put that in your mouth? I gamely opened the first of three nicely branded tubs (£2.99 for a 180g pot). All are smooth in texture, but the chocolate Hou is especially thick, thanks to the coconut milk included in its ingredients.”
But there it is. In the modern world there is a tendency to make everything sweeter. Our taste buds are trained from an early stage to prefer sweet over savoury.
The article continued:
“Health is Tyndall’s main concern. He had a reckless youth, microwaving whole tubs of Ben & Jerry’s and drinking them as smoothies. Now 30, he suffers from kidney stones and gout, possibly as a consequence. He had to reinvent his diet – no red meat, no red wine and definitely no ice-cream smoothies – and that is where the idea for Hou came from. He is especially excited about entering the children’s market; I can confirm that my two-year-old was particularly enthusiastic about the mixed berry flavour, shouting “more hummus” repeatedly in a way that definitely wouldn’t sound sickeningly middle-class if aired in public. Plus, the team behind Hou will be pleased to hear that, with no prior chickpea associations embedded in her head, she had no problem putting it in her mouth.”
Now, the two-year-old in our family eats with delight ordinary, plain, old-fashioned hummus without needing to have chocolate or fruit flavours added. And we don’t feel “sickeningly middle class’ about it.
Personally I have just discovered beetroot hummus, which is interesting, but I prefer the original version.
I have also recently discovered almond butter. I have never been a fan of peanut butter, even though I could eat peanuts until they come out of my ears, but almond butter, no added sugar or artificial flavourings, thank you, I find very good spread on my morning toast.
On the subject of almonds, I found this stuff about almond milk, one of the trendy substitutes for proper milk from cows:
““But what people don’t know is the environmental damage almond plantations are doing in California, and the water cost. It takes a bonkers 1,611 gallons (7,323 litres) to produce 1 litre of almond milk,” says the Sustainable Restaurant Association’s Pete Hemingway. Over 80% of the world’s almonds are grown in California, which has been in severe drought for most of this decade. Hemingway describes a situation in which farmers are ripping up relatively biodiverse citrus groves to feed rocketing demand for almonds, creating a monoculture fed by increasingly deep water wells that threaten statewide subsidence issues. That leaves rather a bad taste in the mouth.”
Here’s a link to the article that came from, an article about sustainable eating, or indeed sustainable living.
You could go crazy thinking about how to organise your life, your eating habits and all the rest. In the end, I suppose, what we need to do is eat sensibly.
Moderation in all things!
Tuesday, 4 September 2018
Getting in tune!
At the Paul Simon concert in Hyde Park in July my sister and I sang along with the best of them. At one point a chap standing just in front of us, with whom we had had a bit of conversation already, turned and said to me, “You have a beautiful singing voice”. I thanked him for the compliment (at least, it sounded like a compliment, not an ironic comment!) and tried not to show my surprise. We laughed about it later as my sister and I swapped stories of music lessons where we were advised to sing quietly or not at all. But it’s hard to be at a concert in a park and hear songs you love and not sing along with everyone else!
When she was small, our eldest granddaughter used to sing along to songs by Ana Belén and Rosa León in Spanish. She had no idea what she was singing. But then, when she snag along to songs in English there were signs that she had no idea what they were about either; “I need a miracle” became “I’m in America”, a concept that made much more sense to a three year old. But her Spanish was delightful. This was just one of the consequences of spending time in the kitchen with me.
As she grew older my brother-in-law started taking her to folk music concerts. She became almost friendly with the folk singer Cara Dillon. She even dabbled with learning to play the tin whistle, the guitar and the keyboard but she was a little too dilettante to persevere properly. And she heard a range of music at our house, especially “music to wash up by”, usually something lively from the sixties. Consequently, as a teenager and now a young adult, she has always had a broad taste in music and knows artists others her age have never heard of.
She too sings Paul Simon songs.
I have no idea what her younger sister listens to. She wears her headphones and clearly listens to something but she doesn’t talk about her music with the passion shown by her older sister. In fact, she doesn’t talk about her music at all.
Her younger brother shares his music with all of us by having the volume turned up too loud. He is thirteen and seems to listen to rap and beatbox (at least I think that’s what it is), stuff with a doomph a doomph beat and incomprehensible, to me anyway, lyrics. But then he also gets sentimental about slow ballads on the car radio. So it goes.
Our four year old granddaughter, cousin to the three mentioned above, has always sung, in the car, playing her games, out and about. She makes her own sings up, sings songs from films like “Frozen” and has gone through the nursery rhymes learnt at preschool: “The wheels on the bus”, “incey wincey spider”, “Twinkle, twinkle little star” and so on. The other day she sang, or rather, recited, for me a version of the “Three bears” story which she had learnt for her “graduation day” from preschool. (Don’t even let me start to talk about my feelings on “graduation days”, “graduation ceremonies” and so on for four year olds!!!)
Now she has progressed to songs like “You are my sunshine”, complete with a whole set of actions. But the most surprising in her range of show tunes is “I love Paris in the springtime”. She knows all the words and ends with a hand on heart emotional “because my love is here!” Where did she learn that?
Our youngest grandchild is mostly still at the “Row, row, row the boat!” stage but I noticed that we were getting a lot of “doo doo, doo doo doo doo”. With a lot of arm waving as well. Puzzled, I asked my daughter what this was all about. “Oh, it’s Baby Shark”, she told me, as though that explained it all. It turned out to be a kids’ song on youtube from South Korea which has gone pretty viral and made it into the UK top 40. Here is a link to the song. And here is a link to a Guardian writer’s exasperated opinion of it. I love his description : “The Baby Shark song and dance video has had more than 1.6bn views on YouTube, by the simple expedient of creating something that sounds as if it was designed specifically to make adults want to yank their own teeth out with rusty pliers.”
So how does a two year old know this! Easy! She has teenage siblings who find it amusing to show her stuff like that on their iPhones and she loves to join in. Very little encouragment is needed to make a child show off!
Now, according to this article, with the right app on your phone you can dress in tune with your musical tastes. So goodness knows how my grandchildren should all dress.
As for me, I already have a hat rather like Leonard Cohen’s trilby - or is it a fedora - so I reckon I am already sorted.
When she was small, our eldest granddaughter used to sing along to songs by Ana Belén and Rosa León in Spanish. She had no idea what she was singing. But then, when she snag along to songs in English there were signs that she had no idea what they were about either; “I need a miracle” became “I’m in America”, a concept that made much more sense to a three year old. But her Spanish was delightful. This was just one of the consequences of spending time in the kitchen with me.
As she grew older my brother-in-law started taking her to folk music concerts. She became almost friendly with the folk singer Cara Dillon. She even dabbled with learning to play the tin whistle, the guitar and the keyboard but she was a little too dilettante to persevere properly. And she heard a range of music at our house, especially “music to wash up by”, usually something lively from the sixties. Consequently, as a teenager and now a young adult, she has always had a broad taste in music and knows artists others her age have never heard of.
She too sings Paul Simon songs.
I have no idea what her younger sister listens to. She wears her headphones and clearly listens to something but she doesn’t talk about her music with the passion shown by her older sister. In fact, she doesn’t talk about her music at all.
Her younger brother shares his music with all of us by having the volume turned up too loud. He is thirteen and seems to listen to rap and beatbox (at least I think that’s what it is), stuff with a doomph a doomph beat and incomprehensible, to me anyway, lyrics. But then he also gets sentimental about slow ballads on the car radio. So it goes.
Our four year old granddaughter, cousin to the three mentioned above, has always sung, in the car, playing her games, out and about. She makes her own sings up, sings songs from films like “Frozen” and has gone through the nursery rhymes learnt at preschool: “The wheels on the bus”, “incey wincey spider”, “Twinkle, twinkle little star” and so on. The other day she sang, or rather, recited, for me a version of the “Three bears” story which she had learnt for her “graduation day” from preschool. (Don’t even let me start to talk about my feelings on “graduation days”, “graduation ceremonies” and so on for four year olds!!!)
Now she has progressed to songs like “You are my sunshine”, complete with a whole set of actions. But the most surprising in her range of show tunes is “I love Paris in the springtime”. She knows all the words and ends with a hand on heart emotional “because my love is here!” Where did she learn that?
Our youngest grandchild is mostly still at the “Row, row, row the boat!” stage but I noticed that we were getting a lot of “doo doo, doo doo doo doo”. With a lot of arm waving as well. Puzzled, I asked my daughter what this was all about. “Oh, it’s Baby Shark”, she told me, as though that explained it all. It turned out to be a kids’ song on youtube from South Korea which has gone pretty viral and made it into the UK top 40. Here is a link to the song. And here is a link to a Guardian writer’s exasperated opinion of it. I love his description : “The Baby Shark song and dance video has had more than 1.6bn views on YouTube, by the simple expedient of creating something that sounds as if it was designed specifically to make adults want to yank their own teeth out with rusty pliers.”
So how does a two year old know this! Easy! She has teenage siblings who find it amusing to show her stuff like that on their iPhones and she loves to join in. Very little encouragment is needed to make a child show off!
Now, according to this article, with the right app on your phone you can dress in tune with your musical tastes. So goodness knows how my grandchildren should all dress.
As for me, I already have a hat rather like Leonard Cohen’s trilby - or is it a fedora - so I reckon I am already sorted.
Monday, 3 September 2018
Getting back into the usual routine!
I have spent a good part of today putting the house to rights after one of those family visit weekends. Our son and his little family came up from the south to stay with us and our daughter and family popped in and out the whole time.
The four year old granddaughter learned to cross the river on stepping stones and showed how brave she was by trying put an enormous slide on an inflatable in the local park. She was booked for five goes but I think one was enough to scare her just a little and she refused to climb up again, opting instead for some much more sensible bouncing!
Yesterday was her small cousin’s second birthday. The smaller one wanted to copy everything her bigger cousin did but we drew the line at climbing up the inflatable slide!
Not far up the road from us in an industrial park. Within the complex, one of the ground floor sections, which in Spain I would refer to simply as a “bajo” someone opened a sort of snack bar, selling coffee and Italian ice creams. Over the last year or so this has morphed into a restaurant, now called “La Rustica”. I ran past the other day and spotted a sign advertising “Traditional southern Italian Sunday lunch served from 12.00 to 5.00.
We have been planning to try the place out for a while and this seemed like a perfect way of getting all the family together for a birthday lunch with minimum effort.
So I checked on their website and phoned early on Saturday evening to make sure that they could accommodate ten or eleven of us plus a four-year-old and an about-to-be-two-year-old. No Sunday lunch being served at present! But we ascertained that they opened at 4.00pm and would be able to accommodate us at 5.00 and were quite happy for us to take a birthday cake and candles along. It would be really useful, they said, if we could let them know in advance what such a large group would like to eat. So Phil and I strolled round and picked up a menu.
Then followed the difficult task of pinning everyone down to make a choice, especially as two of our number were not actually present. But we succeeded and I phoned through the order.
Then about an hour before we were due to go I phoned again as one of the party had decided to change her order! Added to that the fact that we had to organise ferrying people from various parts of Greater Manchester to our house prior to strolling round the corner to the restaurant, it was all growing complicated. But eventually we made it.
The “bajo” had been transformed to look as close as you were going to get to a rustic restaurant in an industrial setting. Lots of check tablecloths, bits of old tree decorated with fairy-lights, wine bottles and candles here and there and Dean Martin singing Italian songs in the background. The only difficulty was that of anyone went to the loo they were in danger of going through the wrong door, taking a wrong turning and finding themselves in the middle of a warehouse. A reminder that we were, in fact on, an industrial estate.
The four-year-old and the now just-two-year-old set about charming everyone, the smaller one carefully copying everything the older one got up to. We tried to make sure they were not interfering with any possible romantic assignations at tables for two. But really, do you organise romantic assignations at 5.00 in the afternoon?
The food was good. The conversation was as good as you can manage when there are eleven of you sitting at a long, narrow table. Nobody moaned. Nobody lost their temper. Nobody felt they had ordered the wrong dish. We did not order dessert because we had the birthday cake. The waitress, the ONLY waitress, owner/manager of the set-up, a lady who spoke English with an Oldham accent but also spoke Italian and appeared to be of Italian heritage - they had just come back from visiting family there, hence the confusing notices outside - joined in the spirit of the occasion and brought out the cake with its candles alight.
We sang happy birthday, the just-two-year-old managed to blow out the candles ... with a little help from those sitting next to her. We paid the bill and off we went. Another successful family event! The sun even shone for us.
And today the sun seems to have departed again, the southern branch of the family has departed, the northern branch of the family has either returned to school and nursery or is preparing to do so tomorrow.
Slowly, normal service is being resumed!
The four year old granddaughter learned to cross the river on stepping stones and showed how brave she was by trying put an enormous slide on an inflatable in the local park. She was booked for five goes but I think one was enough to scare her just a little and she refused to climb up again, opting instead for some much more sensible bouncing!
Yesterday was her small cousin’s second birthday. The smaller one wanted to copy everything her bigger cousin did but we drew the line at climbing up the inflatable slide!
Not far up the road from us in an industrial park. Within the complex, one of the ground floor sections, which in Spain I would refer to simply as a “bajo” someone opened a sort of snack bar, selling coffee and Italian ice creams. Over the last year or so this has morphed into a restaurant, now called “La Rustica”. I ran past the other day and spotted a sign advertising “Traditional southern Italian Sunday lunch served from 12.00 to 5.00.
We have been planning to try the place out for a while and this seemed like a perfect way of getting all the family together for a birthday lunch with minimum effort.
So I checked on their website and phoned early on Saturday evening to make sure that they could accommodate ten or eleven of us plus a four-year-old and an about-to-be-two-year-old. No Sunday lunch being served at present! But we ascertained that they opened at 4.00pm and would be able to accommodate us at 5.00 and were quite happy for us to take a birthday cake and candles along. It would be really useful, they said, if we could let them know in advance what such a large group would like to eat. So Phil and I strolled round and picked up a menu.
Then followed the difficult task of pinning everyone down to make a choice, especially as two of our number were not actually present. But we succeeded and I phoned through the order.
Then about an hour before we were due to go I phoned again as one of the party had decided to change her order! Added to that the fact that we had to organise ferrying people from various parts of Greater Manchester to our house prior to strolling round the corner to the restaurant, it was all growing complicated. But eventually we made it.
The “bajo” had been transformed to look as close as you were going to get to a rustic restaurant in an industrial setting. Lots of check tablecloths, bits of old tree decorated with fairy-lights, wine bottles and candles here and there and Dean Martin singing Italian songs in the background. The only difficulty was that of anyone went to the loo they were in danger of going through the wrong door, taking a wrong turning and finding themselves in the middle of a warehouse. A reminder that we were, in fact on, an industrial estate.
The four-year-old and the now just-two-year-old set about charming everyone, the smaller one carefully copying everything the older one got up to. We tried to make sure they were not interfering with any possible romantic assignations at tables for two. But really, do you organise romantic assignations at 5.00 in the afternoon?
The food was good. The conversation was as good as you can manage when there are eleven of you sitting at a long, narrow table. Nobody moaned. Nobody lost their temper. Nobody felt they had ordered the wrong dish. We did not order dessert because we had the birthday cake. The waitress, the ONLY waitress, owner/manager of the set-up, a lady who spoke English with an Oldham accent but also spoke Italian and appeared to be of Italian heritage - they had just come back from visiting family there, hence the confusing notices outside - joined in the spirit of the occasion and brought out the cake with its candles alight.
We sang happy birthday, the just-two-year-old managed to blow out the candles ... with a little help from those sitting next to her. We paid the bill and off we went. Another successful family event! The sun even shone for us.
And today the sun seems to have departed again, the southern branch of the family has departed, the northern branch of the family has either returned to school and nursery or is preparing to do so tomorrow.
Slowly, normal service is being resumed!
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